ROBERT YOUDS

8 DECEMBER to 27 JANUARY 2018

Barbara Edwards Contemporary is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of work by Robert Youds. Youds makes artworks that challenge our everyday perceptual experience of objects, images, and things. His production and material practice crosses the jurisdictional lines of enquiry between painting, sculpture, photography, and industrial design. In this he assists the beholder in seeing things afresh while further extending our visual boundaries.

In this exhibition, Youds explores pictures/objects as imagined and remembered fragments drawn from our urban world. He plays with the core perceptual conditions of light, shadow, colour, surface, and their communicative relationship to our aesthetic, cultural, and ideological values. Youds invites us to think about consciousness in our time and the ways that we shape it. For example, is a home a home without personal choices evidenced through the careful spatial choreography of pictures, colours, surfaces, and light? Where do our aesthetic dispositions evolve from?

Bruno Taut’s Windows represents Youds’ fictional imaginings of this important early modernist architect’s windows. His building designs celebrated and explored the relationship between the built form and nature through the manipulation of light and shadow in space.

Inspired by Ukrainian born, French artist Sonia Delaunay’s abstract paintings, Sonia Delaunay’s Wardrobe includes a set of painted panels that can be arranged in any order along the shelf. For Youds, this array of panels represents an imagined private collection for the home. The work reflects on the artist’s admiration for Sonia Delaunay and the way she bridged the gap between art, fashion, design, and her lived life.

Robert Youds completed his MFA from York University and holds a BFA from the University of Victoria. His artworks have been exhibited in major public institutions such as Site Santa Fe (USA), National Gallery of Canada, Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Power Plant (Toronto), and Today Art Museum, Beijing, China. Youds’ works are included in numerous public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Cadillac Fairview’s RBC building (Toronto), Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Museum London.

He has been a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria since 1989.

For more information, contact:
barbara@becontemporary.com